Ralph Bakshi's Problem with Postmodernism
At the time and continuing to the present, most audiences recognize the
original film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" as an utter failure. In
1978, controversial animator Ralph Bakshi tried his hand at the sprawling
Tolkien epic. It's rumored that others, including Stanley Kubrick and John
Boorman, backed down from the too-ambitious project. Bakshi, though, strove
on and flopped, and a lot can be learned from the results.
While many animation directors like Walt Disney and Tex Avery had distinctive
styles, Bakshi was probably the first auteur animator. He started off
at Terrytoons, a studio with such strong cartoons as Mighty Mouse and the
forgotten treasure Mr. Hashimoto.
Bakshi left and adapted R. Crumb's "Fritz
the Cat," creating a film audiences flocked to for its X-rated humor. With
1972's Fritz the Cat, Bakshi smashed down the walls imprisoning
animation as a children's medium. He
went on to create the deeply personalized and complexly animated Heavy
Traffic and the arguably racist Coonskin.
After the 1977 release of his fourth film, Wizards, Bakshi tackled The Lord of the Rings.
It was made to be seen in two halves, but the second half never received
the studio go-ahead, so problems with the story are somewhat excusable.
Only somewhat, though. The film cuts off totally unresolved, halfway
through Tolkien's trilogy. Meanwhile, writers Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle pretty
much cut-and-pasted, keeping certain episodes only members of the audience
familiar with the source novels could piece together. On top of that, those few
fans who might have understood the plot hated the sloppy look of
the film.
The animated The Lord of the Rings is hard to watch. It used a process called rotoscoping,
in which the movie was shot in live action and traced one frame at a time.
Since animation uses fewer frames per second, the lost frames made the film
feel choppy and uncomfortable. For large parts of the movie, it looks like
photocopies with coffee stains. Also, mouths don't always match the
dialogue, since most animation relies on the vowels of words, while the
rotoscope chooses mouth shapes at random. Much has been made of the recent
Waking Life and its use of a computerized
version of the technology, but the problems of rotoscoping can more easily be
seen in the 1997 Anastasia, with its strange mouth and figure movement.
Bakshi struggled with the problem of rotoscope overuse throughout most of
his career. It stemmed from a misunderstanding of certain aspects of
postmodernism.
The integration of live action, or semi-live action,
characters into The Lord of the Rings represented pastiche or collage, an essential aspect
of the postmodern mentality on the rise at the time. But the interesting thing
about uniting two disparate parts is, of course, not the parts but the
seam. The artistic challenge of the pastiche is the skill of
combination. This is where the director failed.
Bakshi used rotoscoping magnificently during Wizards, applying it
to stock footage of Nazis marching for scenes that were
purposefully separated from the rest of the story. The boundary created
between the two types of animation was the intriguing part of the piece.
With The Lord of the Rings, though, Bakshi lost that intrigue. At first, rotoscoping works
well; the ringwraiths hunch with eerie roughness. As Frodo Baggins slips
on the magic ring, he is transported to a netherworld, where the dark
riders seem mystically detached from his animated reality.
The film quickly disintegrates any distinction, however, relying on rotoscoping
for everything. Any character without dialogue looks like he's been run
through a mimeograph. The junction between live action and animation means
nothing at that point. Orcs and humans are traced for no other reason than
to cut costs and labor. In an era where meaning comes from careful planning
of technique, the animated The Lord of the Rings shows no such planning. Bakshi continued
this trend through American Pop and Fire and Ice, only regaining some
understanding of pastiche with 1992's Cool World.
What does this mean to the new film version of Tolkien's classic? This film
faces almost the inverse problem. Where the first film failed to make the
real look unreal enough, this one must make the unreal look real.
The advent of computer animation and advances in makeup mean that orcs and
dragons can now seem photorealistic.
But as films like those of the Jurassic Park series continue to make
the unreal seem real, something is lost. The postmodern artistry of
combining disparate elements gets sidestepped. There is something mystical
about the special effect, a certain wonder at knowing it is unreal. When
the stop-motion animation of Beetlejuice comes on-screen, it signals that
this is spectacle, this is fantasy. The original Lord of the Rings captured this idea of keeping special
effects special only for a moment, slipping instead into sloppy filmmaking. The new
version must be conscious both of making the line of pastiche so stark
it breaks the audience's suspension of disbelief and of blending the line
too completely, losing the spectacle and wonder of its mystical world.
Andy Ross (apross@earthlink.net)